Public Opinion Boils Over as Feds Continue Slashing Jobs, Budgets

by Robert Chaney

Like a biology project outgrowing its petri dish, public anger over federal cuts has metastasized from science programs in Montana to many other community services.

The “Stand Up For Science” movement representing researchers from public laboratories and college campuses across the country found itself rallying shoulder-to-shoulder with a national “Hands Off” protest last weekend. Greater Yellowstone communities that held Hands Off events on April 5 included Bozeman, Livingston, Gardiner, Red Lodge, Columbus, Jackson, Wyoming, and Driggs, Idaho, along with other major Montana cities including Missoula, Billings, Helena, Great Falls, Kalispell and Butte. Most events were held at noon last Saturday in public places such as county courthouses.

“Now it’s pulling in women’s issues, veterans’ issues, museum issues, everything,” said Kim Hasenkrug, a retired researcher from the National Institutes of Health affiliated Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana, where he helped organize a Hands Off rally on Saturday. Advocates for Social Security, public lands, Medicaid, free speech and many other causes attended.

Since taking office on January 20, President Donald Trump’s restructuring of the U.S. federal workforce has eliminated tens of thousands of public employees and frozen or canceled funding for a wide variety of government services. Last week, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy triggered about 20,000 staff reductions through firings, early retirements and buy-outs, affecting everything from Head Start preschool children’s assistance to Rocky Mountain Labs’ Lyme disease research.

RML lost about 40 workers in the HHS cuts last week. But the impact could be far larger. A 2023 economic analysis found the 400 jobs at the Ravalli County science campus contributed $89.2 million in local after-tax income and supported an additional $231.8 million spread across affiliated Montana businesses and non-business organizations.

The National Institutes of Health’s Bethesda headquarters shared reports with Mountain Journal that listed the extent of the RIFs. It included the entire Office of Acquisitions, which handled everything from sticky notes to multimillion-dollar contracts for lab support on a nationwide basis. Lab workers in Montana were able to share supplies across projects for a few days after the office was eliminated on April 2, but several said those stocks have run out.

One project at the Hamilton Rocky Mountain Laboratories, for example, involving human tissue acquired from across the United States requires daily sampling at precise times. Workers on that project said they exhausted their supplies of testing materials on April 4, jeopardizing the integrity of the entire experiment.

“The only way they can get anything is if something is still in a stock room in Bethesda,” Hansenkrug said. “Science has pretty much come to a standstill, even for the people who are still there. It’s a tremendous waste of money.”

Both internal and public communications staff were hit particularly hard. That included the people who responded to all congressional inquiries on research activity, as well as handled public outreach, Freedom of Information Act requests, and media questions.

Health and Human Services “is centralizing communications across the department to ensure a more coordinated and effective response to public health challenges, ultimately benefiting the American taxpayer,” an HHS spokesperson told The New York Times on April 1.

Other behind-the-scenes cuts hit the NIH property management staff, which handled everything from identity cards to internal mail service and records storage. The Human Capital Branch recruited and funded new staff and partnerships with NIH labs, along with numerous other human-resources duties.

Public libraries across the nation are scrambling to figure out the ramifications of Trump’s closure of the Institute for Museum and Library Services. While Montana’s funding hasn’t been changed yet, many states with Democrat-led governments have had their support frozen or terminated.

“Montana gets $1.4 million in federal funding through IMLS,” according to Janay Johnson of the Bozeman Public Library Friends and Foundation. That money is distributed across the state, but the impacts will be more acutely felt in rural small-town and reservation-based libraries, she said.

For example, part of that money goes to a software subscription shared among 35 libraries to operate their card catalogs and interlibrary loan network. A single state license connects all those individual libraries. If Bozeman or Missoula had to get an individual subscription, it would cost between $100,000 and $200,000.

Federal funding freezes hit other parts of Montana. Smoke Elser and Eva-Maria Maggi’s presentations on their new book, Hush of the Land, stalled on Thursday, April 3, when their National Endowment for the Humanities grant was canceled.

“On Wednesday night, I received an email from the acting chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, terminating our general operating support grant,” said Jill Baker, executive director of Humanities Montana, the private nonprofit organization that oversees more than $900,000 in federal support for cultural programs throughout the state. “The general operating support grant we receive is close to 90 percent of our funding.”

That affects programming in things as big as national speakers lecturing at Bozeman’s Museum of the Rockies to start-up arts programs in Roscoe.

“Congress allocated that funding to us, so we’re looking at all the avenues to try and reverse this decision,” Baker said. “We’ve been in all 56 counties, and most of our funding has been awarded and invested in rural communities. I’m really worried about the gap that’s going to leave for small museums and libraries.”